1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a processing method and a processor for processing a sentence written in a first natural language (original sentence) to be translated and output as a sentence described in a second natural language (translated sentence).
2. Description of Prior Art
In recent years, automatic translation (machine translation) system by which an English sentence is translated into a Japanese sentence by means of a computer system has been attracting the attention of various people. A translation processor of this kind is composed in such a way as to construct a large-scale data base that is required for the translation processing, and to obtain a high quality product of translation processing by taking full advantage of highly advanced philological and intellectual information processing techniques while retrieving the data base. For this reason, the processing time necessary for translation processing generally takes a relatively long time. That is, a long time period is required between the inputting of an original sentence and obtaining the translated result, the time period being proportional to the degree of complexity of the languages used and the length of the original sentence that is input. A long translation time period is, of course, inconvenient.
This fact leads also to another inconvenience, in a system which performs a conversational translation operation by receiving the response to the translated result while inputting the original sentence, namely, psychological and physical burdens to the operator are increased due to the waiting time for response so that an improvement in the translation processing efficiency cannot be expected.